The interesting thing about this parallel, is that the "final solution" in Germany was final because it was not the original solution.
Originally they wanted to, well, deport the undesirables to some far off country, initially to Madagascar if memory serves.
Managing mass incarceration and deportation is a difficult task however, and these people (both then and now) are not exactly competent at anything beyond bravado.
Watching this unfolding from afar is interesting, because I can do so with some healthy detachment. If I lived across the pond I would be pretty desperate right now.
Unfortunately, if this follows history, the safest thing to do is to not do anything, blend in, and wait for external help. Afaik, only a handful of Germans who resisted survived. But, I don’t see any help for us coming anytime soon.
Yeah, there are some possibilities. For example, if a strong resistance leader emerged. But, are there any good candidates for that role? I can't think of any.
Things like this are stopped by movements, not individual heroes. There are almost certainly organizations in your area already working against this. No one is coming to save us. But if anyone does it is the people who were already trying to, bolstered by people like you who see it now. Get in there.
I recognize the optimism, but realistically, without a strong and strategic leader, coordination will collapse into disorganization and infighting. Historical examples like Occupy Wall Street demonstrate that leaderless movements tend to self-sabotage and generate instability without achieving meaningful outcomes.
>Managing mass incarceration and deportation is a difficult task however, and these people (both then and now) are not exactly competent at anything beyond bravado.
The holocaust also required mass incarceration and deportation, except that the huge undertaking of deportation was towards death camps in occupied territories instead of some foreign land. On the first point above, I caution against thinking that it would be much easier; it wasn't really, they just decided that they wanted to kill the people they considered undesirable after all.
On the second point, it's worth noting that the efforts at expulsion partly failed because many other countries, despite knowing of the brutal repression being suffered by the jews (and others but the jews in particular) decided to stonewall most avenues of exit from Nazi domains. Deportation would have still been terrible, but at least it would have put millions of eventual victims outside the reach of gas chambers and death squads. Such as it was, a sort of tacit complicity of indifference didn't allow that to happen, by others who weren't even necessarily supporters of the Nazis.
In either case, be careful about calling evil people practicing evil ends incompetent. In so many ways they were very competent at far more than simple bravado, and underestimating the capabilities of barbaric monsters is always dangerous for future lessons.
> be careful about calling evil people practicing evil ends incompetent.
The Nazi were a mess, plagued with infighting, and completely incapable of measuring the strength of their opponents, which eventually led to their downfall.
Incompetent evil people can still do a lot of harm until they screw up for good. This doesn't stop them being incompetent.
>The Nazi were a mess, plagued with infighting, and completely incapable of measuring the strength of their opponents, which eventually led to their downfall.
no the Nazis weren't entirely a mess or completely incompetent.
There was lots of infighting, partly deliberately designed to be that way by Hitler's tactics for organizing his own subordinate leadership levels, but there was also a massive amount of military, industrial and logistical competence and a robust amount of cohesion and careful, powerful cooperation on fundamental aims.
Had there not been, the Nazi's never would have risen to power so effectively, formed their dictatorship so effectively or managed a colossal war against multiple enemies for so many years so effectively, and only been defeated at such a gargantuan cost in lives and resources. The Nazis underestimated the military strength of their enemies, but not nearly so badly as to not wage very effective war and pose a very, very serious threat to these enemies for several years.
I really suggest a book called "The Wages of Destruction: the making and breaking of the Nazi Economy" by Adam Tooze, as a nice basic primer on how wrong these ideas of supposedly incompetent Nazis are.
The above is all deviating a bit from the topic at hand but with this sidestep into a look at the Nazis, you're working from a simplistic caricature view of a more complex situation with complex evil people, and I fear that this is also all too common when many critics today view the Trump government. It's not staffed entirely by caricaturesque evil idiots. Many of its supporters are intelligent and cohesive in their guiding methodologies. (Also, no, the above isn't to compare the bad actions of Trump's government to the completely unrestrained monstrosities of the Nazis. I'm comparing defects of external analysis)
Seeing as how this article is talking about the deportation of US citizens, I'm going to question what exactly you mean by "here illegally".
Expanding the argument: I've just decided that you are illegally, and will thus be deported. As there is no due process, my word is law, have fun wherever you end up I literally do not care.
Does that seem fair? And before arguing "well this wouldn't happen, I'm not here illegally", again, this is an article about the deportation of US citizens. Children no less.
But their parents aren’t. Parents can be deported. So let’s imagine they did that. We’d have an article how cruel they stole / kidnapped a child from their parents. Would that be better?
Having a child doesn’t automatically provide a legal cover for staying and not getting deported. Maybe that’s a risk the parents didn’t know about?
No, that is a false dilemma. the right (and constitutional) thing to do is give all these people the due process and access to legal representation that they are entitled to, and work out a legal solution to all these conflicting concerns.
read the habeas petition for VMS (the two year old). The child has a US citizen relative and the father seems to have transferred provisional rights of custody to them.
> The child has a US citizen relative and the father seems to have transferred provisional rights of custody to them.
Right, I think that's the issue here it's not that the parents should be automatically allowed to say, it's that they were not given a chance in court to allow for that process - to find a relative.
There is a complication in the case because the provisional custody was canceled then renewed and transferred to Trish Mack.
> Also on April 22, 2025, V.M.L.’s father executed a Provisional Custody by Mandate under Louisiana Revised Statutes § 9:951, temporarily “delegat[ing] the provisional custody of” his two daughters to his U.S. citizen sister-in-law, who also lives in Baton Rouge, LA. The Mandate was notarized by a valid notary public in the state of Louisiana
> On April 24, 2025, the mandatary named in the Provisional Custody by Mandate terminated the agreement for personal reasons,
> V.M.L.’s father and Next Friend Petitioner Trish Mack executed a new notarized Provisional Custody by Mandate, delegating custodial authority to Ms. Mack
That sounds like something where due process is supposed to come into play. The best of a series of bad alternatives are worked out in a steady manner by a court system, rather than a hopped up racist at the border bragging about the president being in their corner.
I'm all right with changing that rule - anchor babies means we get two people and one them is brand new. Considering people are the most valuable resource, I think we should take all the potential anchors possible - let's give both parents citizenship automatically if they are parents of a citizen.
Let's fast track Aunts and Uncles too - maybe we can get the whole family.
> let's give both parents citizenship automatically if they are parents of a citizen.
Yeah that might work. Wonder if there is any legislative effort on that front. I guess with the current congress it won't happen, so perhaps nobody is trying.
What's the point in arguing about what-ifs? The children were deported. In real life. There's no need for hypothetical scenarios, focus on the actual point of the article and thread.
I am not sure what you're arguing for? Take the children away in real life and hand off to a random foster family. Sometimes they can stay with aunts or uncles. Sometimes there are no aunts or uncles.
> There's no need for hypothetical scenarios, focus on the actual point of the article and thread.
Ok, so what should we discuss about the article? To help the conversation move along it's easier to say "here is what I think" as opposed to tell someone "don't think or say that!" and leave it a that.
US citizen father wasn't allowed to take custody of his US citizen child, who was subsequently removed from the country to a place where the child presumably is not a citizen.
That's where court proceedings to establish custody would be necessary. But regardless, it's illegal to deport a citizen, especially to a third country where they are not a citizen.
> What's the point in arguing about what-ifs? The children were deported.
Anyone arguing in what-ifs agrees with the deportation but can't be that blatantly racist on here. Ignoring this specific case allows them to muddy the waters. Anyone playing Devil's Advocate consistently are usually part of the devil's party.
How do you know they are "illegally" shielding people? Was there any kind of process to figure this out?
Also, a few days back, you made the same point and someone furnished you links where legal migrants are being caught in a net. This is not an argument in good faith.
> When Hillary called half the nation "deplorables", that was closer to Hitler rhetoric than anything I've heard out of this administration.
Technically Secretary Clinton called half of her opponent’s supporters a “basket of deplorables.” So 0.25 of the voting population at most.
But if that sounds worse than anything uttered by this administration, you’re not listening closely. I’m Canadian and we’ve been called “one of the nastiest countries.”
> We're not deporting "undesirables", just those who flooded in here illegally.
Ironically you say that in the comments section of a US citizen being held prior to deportation. Maybe those pesky children are flooding in there illegally?
> if we didn't have people trying to illegally shield them from ICE.
If only those annoying people weren't trying to hide Jews from the SS back in the day eh?
> Equating that to Nazi Germany is disingenuous and completely off the mark.
By all means, proceed. I am watching from afar with amusement as the US descends into banana Republic status with a sprinkle of old school European fascism now that the ICE is basically acting like Stasi or Gestapo from years past.
I wonder what you would consider to be enough for the comparison to not be disingenuous anymore. Perhaps when the ovens are burning in some Central American death camp.
Why then are people with legal visas being detained or having their visas revoked if it is just those who "flooded here illegally" under threat?
Clinton said that many Trump voters were deplorables. Trump said that many immigrants are not human. Now I know which sounds more like the Nazis to me.
> "The Democrats say, 'Please don't call them animals. They're humans.' I said, 'No, they're not humans, they're not humans, they're animals,'" said Trump, president from 2017 to 2021.
I agree that "alien" is a fairly dehumanizing term, but this isn't what I am talking about. Trump said "No, they're not humans, they're not humans, they're animals."
>When Hillary called half the nation "deplorables", that was closer to Hitler rhetoric than anything I've heard out of this administration.
Lol. That was three campaigns ago, and she was correct, and you guys are still whining about it like a bunch of snowflakes. Let it go. Hillary Clinton can't hurt you anymore.
> When Hillary called half the nation "deplorables", that was closer to Hitler rhetoric than anything I've heard out of this administration.
Here’s Trump straight-up uding white nationalist rhetoric:
> Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions [and] insane asylums. We know they're terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we're witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It's poisoning the blood of our country. It's so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.
Now, it’s telling that you’re pretending not to have heard your guy say things like that while his administration is sending people to concentration camps without due process but are still upset about something from a decade ago which you are misrepresenting.
Here’s the full quote, which is notable because she identified the specific behaviors she considered deplorable AND explicitly called for sympathy for the large group of people who are motivated by problems in their lives rather than bigotry. Also note that she’s talking about half of the third of the country which votes for him.
> You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
> But the "other" basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here: I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and – as well as, you know, New York and California – but that "other" basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but – he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
That makes quite the contrast where he looks worse the more of his speech you read while her speech looks better in context and makes it clear that while he hates people based on who they are, she reserved judgement based on what they do.
The end goal was world domination, as in owning whole world. So, they would eventually come to Madagascar too.
Majority of Jews killed in Hocaust were not Germans. They were from conquered countries.
So, while there was some Madagascar plans floating and while they tried to deport as many German Jews (majority of who were atheists, considered themselves Germans etc) in first stages, they were aware there is going to be showdown later on anyway.
I too have noticed the same language coming out of folks here, folks that have had accounts for over 10 or 15 years. They were always here, but now they emboldened and they are doing their best to make sure that overton window stays very very open on the right.
I had a friend until recently. Really nice guy. Always looking out for people. Never said a bad word. In the last couple of years he turned into a nasty piece of work jumping on every politicised story out there and treating it as gospel. He alienated everyone around him.
It turns out that some people don't have a mind of their own and are waiting for orders.
Here is no exception. Look at the foaming at the mouth praise of the second coming of Microsoft when Satya took over. And where we are now? Look at the hype as well - blockchain, crypto and AI now. Mindless people slithering all over everything.
In fact I find a lot of the people in the technology sector to either be entirely morally bankrupt or lack any kind of self or societal awareness of their speech of actions. It disgusts me. I've been on HN pretty much since day one but the accounts last perhaps 6 months before I tire of it.
I moved out of the tech-first industry about 10 years ago and into a position of tech as a tool not a reason for a business existing and there are better people here.
I’ve been in tech for about 2 decades now, and the general culture has always been to disregard ethics and social impact. How many times have we heard “We’re just building tools. Tools are apolitical and ethically neutral, it’s how you use them that matters!” It turns out that is actually not the case.
Plus the insistence that we can cordon off an area of life and designate it non political is incredibly common but also pretty naive (and dare I say privileged).
That is to say, we in the tech industry often encourage this sort of moral bankruptcy and like to pretend we’re above it all.
I think a lot of that attitude is self-justification to proceed as they intend without moral compass. Personally I can't do that. Everything we do has a consequence.
I've got a copy of Careless People sitting in front of me I'm scared to read at the moment.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
It’s definitely a factor (perhaps the dominant factor) and the easiest place to see it at play is on HN whenever the adtech industry is being criticized.
Since we are quoting, I quote FDR: "Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations--not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership in government."
True, we are not in bad shape like 1930s Germany or United States but as neoliberalism rot has really set in, people feel economically shaky, and government clearly is not responsive to them. Combined with Social Media warping people brain on what is "success" and "strong man" who will take care of things is clearly appealing. Many of them can also be turned around but it's going to take some doing.
”Do you think the nazis appeared out of thin air? No they were everywhere just waiting for someone to enable them with a label and an ideology.”
I suspect something analogous is happening here and it’s similarly not pretty. Hopefully it’ll get nipped in the bud quickly.
My fellow citizens scare me more than the government does.